As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Cloud computing is seeing an increase in users. Cloud computing may be broadly defined as a type of computing (often Internet-based) that provides shared information handling system processing resources and data to information handling systems and other devices on demand. It is a model for enabling ubiquitous, on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable information handling system resources (e.g., information handling system networks, servers, storage, applications and services), which can be rapidly provisioned and released, often with minimal management effort. Cloud computing and storage solutions provide users and enterprises with various capabilities to store and process their data in either privately-owned, or third-party data centers that may be located far from the user, ranging in distance from across a city to across the world.
Two of the most important features of cloud computing implementations are scalability and elasticity. Scalability is an ability of a system to increase its workload on its existing hardware resources, while elasticity is the ability of a system to increase its workload on existing hardware resources and additional hardware resources which may be dynamically added on demand. Thus, cloud computing offers users and enterprises the opportunity to scale their computing resources whenever they deem it necessary. This may be done by either increasing or decreasing resources to meet a demand, allowing a user or enterprise to pay only for the resources they are utilizing.
Cloud computing is often highly dependent on a host system processor which utilizes a significant number of processor cycles, which may also lead to slower performance for other applications in the system or degradation of system performance, or lead to increased spending for additional resources.